The Business
A residential and commercial water-feature company — the team that designs, builds, and maintains custom fountains and water features. With a crew of roughly 15 to 25 people, 50-plus active projects running at any given time, and an archive of more than 700 completed builds, the operation had quietly outgrown the patchwork of software it started on.
The Problem: Four Systems, None of Them Talking
Like most growing field-service businesses, they hadn’t chosen a fragmented stack — they had accumulated one, one tool at a time:
- Salesforce ran the sales pipeline.
- Zoho — CRM, Projects, and the wider Zoho One suite — ran project work and daily operations.
- QuickBooks Online held the books.
- Spreadsheets filled every gap: scheduling, dispatch, job-costing, and maintenance tracking.
Each tool worked fine on its own. Together, they created three expensive problems. The subscription bill had crept up to roughly $2,500 a month. Nearly every employee who logged in added another fee. And, worst of all, the company’s data was trapped in four separate silos. A simple question like “are we actually making money on this install?” meant pulling figures from three systems that didn’t even agree on what a “customer” was.
The Approach: One Platform They Own, in 8 Weeks
We replaced all four with a single platform — the all-in-one business software (ERPNext) — running inside the company’s own private, walled-off section of Google Cloud. Rather than a risky big-bang rebuild, we ran a focused two-month plan: migrate the data cleanly, stand up the standard, proven workflows first, then layer their specific needs on top.
Between October and December 2025, more than 300,000 records moved out of Salesforce, Zoho, QuickBooks, and the spreadsheets and into one system — deduplicated and validated along the way, with nothing lost.
What We Built
Field service & maintenance. Recurring maintenance contracts, a daily dispatch board, site briefings for crews heading out, full visit history for every site, and mobile time tracking so field hours land in the system automatically.
Sales & project delivery. A CRM pipeline that replaced Salesforce, an automatic hand-off from “deal won” straight to the operations team, project job-costing so every build’s profitability is visible in real time, and procurement tied to the same records.
Finance, brought in-house. Accounting moved off QuickBooks Online entirely and into the platform. Stripe handles card payments. An AI assistant reads incoming invoices and documents and files them automatically — checking that the invoice, the purchase order, and the delivery receipt all agree before anything gets paid.
Platform & field operations. Live dashboards and reporting, an AI assistant that works across the company’s own data, central management of the tablets crews carry into the field, and a client portal — all behind one login, with no fee for every employee who logs in.
The Results
- Roughly 88% lower software cost — from about $2,500/month to around $300/month. Instead of stacked per-seat subscriptions, they now pay for the computing power they use, like a utility bill.
- 10 to 20 hours a week reclaimed for each office employee, as double-entry and spreadsheet wrangling disappeared.
- 300,000+ records consolidated into a single source of truth.
- Live in 8 weeks, with no lost data and no extended downtime.
- Data no longer siloed — every department finally works from the same records, and the company owns all of it.
Built to Own, Built to Last
Because the platform runs on infrastructure the company controls — not rented seats on someone else’s servers — it is theirs to grow into. New crew members don’t add license fees. The data lives in one place, in a standard the business owns, with AI built into how the system runs rather than bolted on as yet another subscription.
For the engineering detail behind the migration, read the Field Notes write-up: Four Systems, One Platform. To see what consolidating your own stack would look like, talk to us.